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Finding a Gold Mine in Digital Ditties

Joel Moss Levinson always knew he had a calling in life. But it took cheap video cameras, YouTube and some desperate corporations to show him what it was.

Mr. Levinson’s skill is turning out homemade corporate commercials — what advertisers call a form of “user-generated content.” Companies, frantic to connect with younger consumers, sponsor contests seeking these commercials to find new ways to advertise their products, often attracting hundreds of entries and lots of attention.

So far, Mr. Levinson, a college dropout with dozens of failed jobs on his résumé, has won 11 contests — earning more than $200,000 in money and prizes. His success has made him into the digital age version of Evelyn Ryan, the woman from Defiance, Ohio, who supported her family by winning commercial jingle contests in the 1950s and ’60s.

While Mrs. Ryan’s talent was in writing, Mr. Levinson’s is in performing. He won $100,000 from Klondike after filming himself in the Arctic singing about Klondike bars. He won four months worth of free hotel stays from Best Western for a song he performed about his water cooler. When Little Penguin wine asked customers to film their best pickup line, Mr. Levinson submitted a video of his efforts to pick up a toy penguin, and won a trip to Australia.

He has won trips to Budapest, Buenos Aires and Copenhagen from Delta Air Lines; an iPod from the American National CattleWomen; and $6,000 from the Israel Project, an advocacy group, after honors in three separate categories — English, German and Russian — and he barely speaks German or Russian.

It is especially great when idiocy is sponsored by corporations. Companies began soliciting these commercials a few years ago after noticing YouTube’s popularity, and wagered that campaigns created by customers might resonate with customers and turn into viral hits.

The initial commercials ran online only, but the fad has grown, and they now regularly run on television. Prizes have grown, too: this year, Doritos intends to run a user-generated commercial during the next Super Bowl, and offering $1 million to the winner.

Mr. Levinson, 28, has a hummingbird-like metabolism and attention span that seem made for the YouTube era. He grew up in Dayton, Ohio, where his father was a prosecutor and his mother was a writer. “He’s always willing to be outrageous,” said his father, Jim Levinson. “Joel gets determined to pursue something, and he will devise some way to get there.”

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Joel Moss Levinson has won nearly a dozen sponsor contests for commercials.Credit
Nicholas Roberts for The New York Times

After a few semesters at George Washington University, where he declared that his major was medieval weaponry, he dropped out. Soon, he was living out of his car — happily, he says.

He settled briefly in Los Angeles, then New York, and made money from odd jobs: night clerk at a 24 Hour Fitness, going door to door promoting tree conservation, leading children’s songs at Jewish summer camps. “I think my résumé is up to, like, 40 jobs, and they’re all terrible,” he said.

He was working as a comedy-club usher in Indianapolis in spring 2007 when he read that Planet Smoothie, a franchise based in Atlanta, was looking for someone to be its Cupman mascot.

“When I read the description, it was like, ‘Actors, comics, musicians,’ — whatever,” Mr. Levinson said, “‘Would you be interested in traveling the country? Would you be interested in dressing like a giant smoothie?’ Well, on all of those fronts, kind of, yes.”

For his entry, he stared into the camera, writhing and singing lyrics like, “I wanna found a new country in Asia and call it Cupistan.” There were 95 entries, but his won easily.

“Everyone just kind of fell in love with Joel,” said Chris Morocco, a Planet Smoothie executive. “We had people coming in singing the jingle.”

He followed that with several small contest victories, but it took some time before he could support himself on them. He was so poor that when he filmed a video for the National Beef Ambassador program sponsored by the CattleWomen, “I couldn’t even buy steak for the video so I had to use chili,” he said. “It’s a song called ‘More Beef in More Places,’ and the only place I could afford to eat it was my apartment.”

His entries, usually songs, began to take on a pattern. The choruses are strong declarations of love for the product — “My favorite place is Maine,” “I’d eat my Klondike bar in the Arctic,” “I wish the whole Middle East looked like Israel” — and the verses are packed with absurdist supporting arguments (Maine is where “the blueberries taste so good you feel like Violet Beauregarde.”).

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Among Mr. Levinson's entries were YouTube videos about how much he loved Israel, above, and his water cooler.

He also began to bring his video camera on trips that he had won, exploiting the tours for the scenery. When he was sent to Australia for the wine contest, he filmed segments for Oreo and Nesquik contests. When he won a Nature Valley granola bar contest and his prize was a trip to the Arctic, he filmed the spots for Klondike and for the Israel Project, for which he dressed in a penguin suit.

“When you think of Israel as a great democracy, you don’t think of a guy in a penguin costume running around,” said Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, the founder of the Israel Project. “That’s the point of the Web. You want something viral that will be catchy, that people will say, that’s different."

Because he likes situational comedy in his life as well as his art, Mr. Levinson recruited a blind date online for the two-week cruise. His date, Maggie Boulware, said Mr. Levinson had astoundingly high energy.

“Once, I made him mad — I can’t even remember what it was for — but it was the only 10 minutes of silence on the trip,” Ms. Boulware said. She acted as Mr. Levinson’s cinematographer on the ship, and though they broke up after the trip, he gave her $2,500 from the Klondike prize.

Mr. Levinson’s gregariousness is an asset in the user-generated content world, as many of these contests are determined by voting. Mr. Levinson has a Facebook group entitled “Yes, Joel, I’ll vote for your newest stupid contest” and he uses Twitter, blogs, e-mail and text messages, asking acquaintances to vote. He even calls 24-hour customer service lines at night, when he thinks the representatives are bored, and asks them to vote for him.

With so many victories, though, Joel Levinson’s fame may start to work against him. But so far, the companies have not been put off by his quasi-professional background. When Klondike discovered Mr. Levinson’s track record, it did not affect its decision, said Wesley Boas, its brand manager.

Ms. Mizrahi of the Israel Project said it did not bother her, either. “The fact that he sits on a computer banging these out one after another, great for him,” she said. “His pieces were far better than anything else that we got.”

Mr. Levinson is working on his Doritos entry for the Super Bowl but he has not forgotten his roots. He says he will enter any user-generated contest, no matter how small, and is at work on videos for Bush Brothers & Company beans, Home Depot, Contiki vacations, Krazy Glue and a telecommunications company in Kansas. But as a point of professional pride, he refuses to enter sweepstakes or any other game that depends on luck.

“A sweepstakes is like a lottery, right? Everyone’s equal,” he said. “With contests, I feel like I’m able to bring whatever skills I have to the table.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Decades After the Jingle Lady, A Gold Mine in Digital Ditties. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe